cheap, low power 24/7 home file server - what do you think?

Phibsboro

Hi,

I am looking to revamp my media situation at home. I have ordered one of those Revo 3600 from the bargains alert forum as my new player. I want to move all my media off the various places it currently resides into one always on server. I want the server to draw as little power as poss, especially when its not in use. I also want it to be expandable as I might try my hand again at a MythTV server and so would need a few free slots (which eliminates the Atom).

I have come up with this...
Semperon 140 CPU http://www.ebuyer.com/product/168973
Asus M4A78 MB http://www.ebuyer.com/product/168321
2 x WD Green 750gb HD http://www.ebuyer.com/product/168374
HP 2GB DDR2 800Mhz http://www.ebuyer.com/product/146920
350w 80+ Certified PSU http://www.ebuyer.com/product/151783

I have a case I can throw it all into. So that all comes to €273 delivered.

Any thoughts? Will that PSU start up the two 750 HDs? Any one got any thoughts on replacing the cpu/mb/psu with a barebones, mainly to get a better looking case? (ideally with an AMD chipset so I can have the possibility of unlocking the second core in the 140)

Thanks for having a look,
C

The_Thing

Hi, Phibsboro,

Have a look @ http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055711596

Phibsboro

The_Thing wrote: »

Hi, Phibsboro,

Have a look @ http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055711596

Ohh that is interesting! I never thought of re-using some gear. I went scrounging round and found a couple of old motherboards. I then decided to check out the case I had earmarked to see what the PSU was like. Lo and behold there is an old AMD mb in there with an XP chip, gig of ram, a couple of sata slots and possibly a gbit nic! I tend to forget the old babies when a new baby arrives :P

I'm not sure I'd stick with Freenas long term (cos I might wanna run a Myth backend) but I am definitely going to stick a couple of old pata drives in there this evening and see how it all goes. If it seems to work ok with my hackingtosh and win laptops I'll prolly just order the two 750's and the high efficiency psu from the above list. (or maybe a tb green drive and a ****ey tb external to hold occasional backups?). BTW, what is the advantage of booting of a CF card? Is there the same advantage to booting from a USB stick?

Thanks for the suggestion, I think you've saved me a few bob

C

The_Thing

Hello again Phibsboro,

The motherboard I'm using on my own FreeNas box is one of these - > http://asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=J9FKa8z2xVId3pDK&templete=2 coupled with an AMD Athlon 64 3200 CPU and 1 GB of RAM.

My only gripe with the board above is that it doesn't have any onboard video (I don't think it'll boot without a video card), so I had a look at work and found an old ATI PCI card (circa 1995) that did the trick. However, having said that, apart from the time spent when you're setting it up you can run your FreeNAS box headless and configure it remotely.

In a similar fashion to kdouglas I too have FreeNAS booting from a 128 MB flash card, but I used a card reader - the kind that usually fits into the floppy disk bay and connects internally to a USB connector on the motherboard - I say usually because for security I didn't want the compact flash card or reader exposed at all so I mounted it internally like a hard drive but with the front of the card reader facing towards the back of the case for ease of access by myself should I need to open the case.

The advantage of a FreeNAS embedded install onto a USB drive, flash card, etc, is that it's only around 28 MB in its entirety and installing it in this fashion will allow you to use all the hard drives in your box solely as data drives so if you ever want to swap out any of them your OS will still be in place on the flash media.

With the above in mind it should also be possible (at least in theory) to install FreeNAS embedded on a USB flash drive and use it as a portable OS for turning any computer than can be booted from USB into a temporary FreeNAS server should the need arise.

I bought this CoolerMaster case - > http://www.dabs.ie/products/coolermaster-elite-330-blk-midi-case---wind-no-psu-rc-330k-kwpc-6890.html?refs=50915 for about €45.00, and two of these - > http://www.dabs.ie/products/icy-dock-aluminium-mobile-rack-sata-bla-5F2R.html?q=icy%20dock for about €47.00 each.

The current issue of PC Live! has the second installment of a FreeNAS article which might be of some help to you too.

Let us know how you get on with it.

Phibsboro

Soooo - messing round with old gear is never easy!

The old machine doesn't have a floppy drive and I don't have an ide/cf adapter so I wanted to get it booting from a USB key. But mobo wasn't liking the freenas image thingy on a usb. Booting from a CD and installing onto USB didn't work either, the mobo just wouldn't boot it. I reckoned the problem was mobo bios version but I couldn't for the life of me get the yoke to update its bios. After hours of messing around with bootable usb's of various descriptions I eventually found a tool hidden in a members only part of the MSI forums that succeeded in updating the bios. This is turn allowed one particular type of formatted USB to boot the freenas image. This literally took two days to get to this point - I know I should have given up and got the adapter but I love solving techie issues so it was all good. But then, wouldn't ya know, freenas wouldn't boot It fails with a BTX halted message during the boot. Googling this gives a mess of different issues - basically freebsd ain't no windows (or linux for that matter) when it comes to working with different types of gear. So I gave up on booting usb!

For now I have it booting to the CD with the usb for the config file. I have set up a couple of drives. These work fine on the windows machines (though maxing at around 5MBs) but are behaving strangely on the OSX box - stuff appears to copy over but its not there when its finished.

In general though its an interesting experience trying to reuse the old box, I have severely underclocked the Athlon and the whole thing is nice and quiet which is great. I think with the mobo/cpu/ram money I've saved I might invest in a gigabit switch, see if I can improve that 5MBs number (I'll need more than for any HD content I think).

Any one got any numbers for their figures to and from a freenas box?

Cheers,
c

The_Thing

Phibsboro, just wondering with regards to the OS X problems you've experienced .....did you format the drive(s) to UFS via the web GUI before you started using them? And also what services did you enable? I'm not 100% sure, but I think you'll need to enable NFS (Network File System) to work with OS X.

The text I've quoted below can be found at the bottom of the "Mount Point" page for each hard drive:

"UFS and variants are the NATIVE file format for FreeBSD (the underlying OS of FreeNAS). Attempting to use other file formats such as FAT, FAT32, EXT2, EXT3, or NTFS can result in unpredictable results, file corruption, and loss of data!"

Now, keeping the above in mind..... When I first learned of FreeNAS I set it up on a spare laptop and I formatted both of the drives in the laptop to UFS and I had no problems at all with it once I enabled CIFS/SMB (for my Windows box) and UPnP for my PS3. However, when it came to my self-build NAS I did not format to UFS initially - I left the drive as it was (NTFS), enabled the services as before, and my Windows box was able to see it.
But I was unable to get UPnP to work properly at all under NTFS. Once I reformatted the drive to UFS all was well.

Perhaps your OS X problems stem from the file system you're using?

*What specification is the NIC in the "old box"? You won't see any benefits in a gigabit switch if your "old box" NIC isn't gigabit too.

Phibsboro

The_Thing wrote: »

Phibsboro, just wondering with regards to the OS X problems you've experienced .....did you format the drive(s) to UFS via the web GUI before you started using them? And also what services did you enable? I'm not 100% sure, but I think you'll need to enable NFS (Network File System) to work with OS X.

The text I've quoted below can be found at the bottom of the "Mount Point" page for each hard drive:

"UFS and variants are the NATIVE file format for FreeBSD (the underlying OS of FreeNAS). Attempting to use other file formats such as FAT, FAT32, EXT2, EXT3, or NTFS can result in unpredictable results, file corruption, and loss of data!"

Now, keeping the above in mind..... When I first learned of FreeNAS I set it up on a spare laptop and I formatted both of the drives in the laptop to UFS and I had no problems at all with it once I enabled CIFS/SMB (for my Windows box) and UPnP for my PS3. However, when it came to my self-build NAS I did not format to UFS initially - I left the drive as it was (NTFS), enabled the services as before, and my Windows box was able to see it.
But I was unable to get UPnP to work properly at all under NTFS. Once I reformatted the drive to UFS all was well.

Perhaps your OS X problems stem from the file system you're using?

*What specification is the NIC in the "old box"? You won't see any benefits in a gigabit switch if your "old box" NIC isn't gigabit too.

Thanks for that.

Ye, I did the drives as UFS. I reckon it's something I've done (or not done) - I only set up CIFS service and was kinda surprised when these showed up immediately in the OSX finder I prolly have to do some more config, maybe try and get AFP running. And yes, amazingly I have a giga NIC in the old box, I was thinking ahead there alright

Do you know what kind of transfer rates you are getting at the moment?
c

The_Thing

Sorry for the late reply, Phibsboro.

I'm using this -> http://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/ to monitor my bandwidth usage.

It's "Speed Meter" component has recorded the following:

Incoming Outgoing
======== ========
Current Transfer Rate 173 KB/s 5.13 MB/s
Average Transfer Rate 323 KB/s 9.64 MB/s
Maximum Transfer Rate 345 KB/s 10.3 MB/s
Total Data Transferred 25.58 MB 781.09 MB

Elapsed time: 00-01-21

The above info refers to one *.iso file which I drag-n-dropped from my Desktop to my NAS self-build. Both the source and destination drives are 7200 RPM SATA's, and the NIC's in both machines are Gigabit, however the router I'm currently using is a Netgear one -> http://www.netgear.com/Products/RoutersandGateways/WirelessGRouters/WGR614.aspx?detail=Specifications

Phibsboro

Just a quick update.

The CIFS/OSX solved itself, just started working, not sure what the deal was

I got a giga switch and my transfer rate has gone up to 30MBs which should be fine for my purposes.

Am loving freenas in general also getting great use out of the built in torrent client - so handy being able to set up a torrent and turn off the main pc.

c